The Power of Urban Ethnic Places

Cultural Heritage and Community Life

Jan Lin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136909856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Power of Ethnic Places discusses the growing visibility of ethnic heritage places in U.S. society. The book examines a spectrum of case studies of Chinese, Latino and African American communities in the U.S., disagreeing with any perceptions that the rise of ethnic enclaves and heritage places are harbingers of separatism or balkanization. Instead, the text argues that by better understanding the power and dynamics of ethnic enclaves and heritage places in our society, we as a society will be better prepared to harness the economic and cultural changes related to globalization rather than be hurt or divided by these same forces of economic and cultural restructuring.

1
DOING ETHNIC HISTORY FROM COAST TO COAST

East Coast Memories

I came to the United States at the age of five from Taiwan and grew up in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. While I culturally assimilated to the English language and American ways of life and did well in high school, I never quite fitted into the social mainstream and had a tight group of off-center friends, some with anti-establishment views. At college in the early 1980s, I gravitated to campus student movements organizing around such issues as opposition to South African apartheid through divestment and a renewed peace movement for nuclear arms control. There was the growth of identity politics connecting to social movements for women, racial–ethnic minorities and gays/lesbians. After college I worked as a management analyst in public service with the unemployment office in Boston, Massachusetts and volunteered as a tenant organizer on the weekends. I had learned to work on a professional level within the governmental establishment but I continued to do my rabble-raising in the Somerville neighborhood where I lived.

I entered graduate school in the late 1980s at the New School for Social Research in New York City, a compact university located in Greenwich Village that was a historical fount of dissidence and critical thinking. Faculty and students were actively engaged in agendas of academic research as well as social movement politics. My mentor, Janet Abu-Lughod, was a world-renowned scholar in urban and globalization research with experience also in planning and community studies. She encouraged me to do action research in the field and sparked my understanding of how social change in local and neighborhood contexts are affected by world-level forces. After doing participatory action research as an organizer and recording secretary with the Joint Planning Council of the Lower East Side, I turned to Manhattan’s Chinatown as my focus for research and action. Around this time, I learned of the work of the New York Chinatown History Project, established by founders such as John Kuo Wei Tchen and Charlie Lai, to preserve and document the history of Chinese immigration through the gateway of New York City. I volunteered as an intern as part of the team documenting research and an exhibition on the history of garment workers. I also worked on the board of It’s Time, a Chinatown housing and community development organization.

On the West Coast, Chinese American historians were already broadening public understanding of the legacy of Chinese immigration into the mining and railroad industries and their subjection to terrible collective racial violence and immigrant exclusion from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth centuries.¹The East Coast was somewhat a backdrop to the West Coast story until the 1960s, when dynamics of “globalization” brought new flows of Chinese labor and capital and Manhattan’s Chinatown emerged to become America’s largest Chinese enclave.²While there was less of a history of “ethnic cleansing” episodes on the East Coast, the historians of the New York Chinatown History Project brought attention to the history of immigrant struggle and adjustment in the tenement neighborhoods and sweatshops of the manufacturing and service sector. The laundry workers and garment workers of the East Coast were heroes of Chinese American history like the miners and railroad workers of the West Coast.

I was drawn to the work of the New York Chinatown History Project through a sense of personal epiphany and self-discovery. I was already intrigued by the history of the Lower East Side as a portal of immigration to the United States. The adjacent ethnic enclave of Chinatown gave me an opportunity to examine the ancestors to my own Chinese American odyssey, immigrants who didn’t have as comfortable a middle-class upbringing as I did and had to struggle over greater barriers of economic hardship and racial prejudice. Other projects were emerging like the Eldridge Street Synagogue and the Tenement Museum established by Ruth Abrams, to preserve the ethnic heritage of Little Italy and the Jewish Lower East Side. Going to Chinatown for me became a cultural pilgrimage of personal discovery as well as a being in a field site for ethnographic and participant action research. Chinatown was for me not a religious site, but a spiritual and educational destination. My pilgrimage was a search for ethnic heritage.

I make a comparison between my local and urban exploration of roots and racial–ethnic heritage in the immigrant gateway of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, to international pilgrimages to ancestral homelands or cultural heritage sites such as the phenomenon of Chinese Americans going to China. Jewish Americans make quite comparable journeys when they visit the Tenement Museum or Holocaust museums, tour the concentration camps of Eastern Europe, or travel to Israel to work on a kibbutz. Ethnic heritage sites offer explorations of ethnic collective memory that may be locally rooted or dispersed in a global diaspora. In the U.S. context, they pluralize our understanding of public history and collective memory while charting the way to a more internationalist understanding of America’s place in the still changing global order.

A decade earlier, Alex Haley had documented his own pilgrimage of cultural heritage discovery in Africa with the story of his ancestor, Kunta Kinte, who was kidnapped in Gambia and brought to the province of Maryland in 1767 to be a slave. His 1976 documentary novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, was subsequently developed into a popular television mini-series and won the Pulitzer Prize. Alex Haley ultimately took some legal challenges related to authorship but his cumulative efforts did a lot to spur interest in family genealogy and ethnic heritage work in America.³ President Barack Obama made a similar pilgrimage to Kenya in his journey to see his father and meet the African side of his family, in the final section of his book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

West Coast Oral Histories

In spring 2006, in my current role as sociology professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, I taught two sections of a freshman undergraduate seminar called “Los Angeles: From Pueblo to World City.” A significant part of the work for the semester was a community-based learning project in Los Angeles Chinatown that put the students to work in teams to conduct oral histories of leaders in the community. We all read Lisa See’s colorful and well-researched family history, On Gold Mountain: The One-Hundred-Year-Old Odyssey of My Chinese-American Family, and made field orientation trips to Chinatown. We partnered with the Chinese American Museum of Los Angeles and the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California to identify dozens of leaders representing different sectors of business and community life, including restaurants, art galleries, journalistic media, community organizing, education, the historical societies, and also a former Miss Chinatown. We tried to create a sample that was mix-gendered and included a variety of adult age groups.⁴

This Los Angeles oral history project was different from my earlier work in New York City that exposed the quiet struggles of the Chinese proletariat, laundry workers, and garment workers who toiled unseen but contributed to the classic iconography of immigrant labor and adjustment to America. The Los Angeles Chinatown oral histories were more representative of the middle-class business and community leadership. Our students posed general open-ended questions about personal memories of family life and growing up, vocational and voluntary accomplishments, and reflections on history and social change in Los Angeles Chinatown.

The Los Angeles Chinatown oral history project was a significant experience of intergenerational and intercultural encounter, since the college students were mainly white and Latino and decades younger than the informants. I was about a decade younger than many of the informants, but I feel very much a part of the same social movement, commonly described as the Asian American movement.⁵I wanted the students to experience education through active real-world involvement with people and a community beyond the textbook. Oral history work offers great opportunities for transformative intercultural experience in the interaction between interviewers, interviewees, and audiences. I feature particularly excerpts from the founders and leaders of Chinese American historical societies and community organizing groups. Their voices resonate with the wisdom and energy of decades of professional and voluntary work documenting the oral history and heritage of Chinese Americans and promoting the value of social activism and educational volunteerism to the community.

Suellen Cheng is a curator at the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Cultural Monument and founding president of the Chinese American Museum of Los Angeles and speaks of overcoming personal shame over humble beginnings and promoting the history of immigrant struggle in Los Angeles Chinatown:

I think being a historian, I have the responsibility of sharing the experiences and stories of all individuals and not just the select stories of the elites. I grew up learning the history of important people’s stories, and often felt ashamed of sharing my story, because everybody would say, “Oh what did your father do?” … I was ashamed of even talking about my mother, because my mother was not fortunate to actually even have a day of formal education. In Fujian province, where they were born, they were poor and they were in the remote countryside.⁶

Suellen has directed, trained, and mentored many students and professional staff over the years in the business of researching, curating, and exhibiting ethnic artifacts and heritage, fundraising, staff development, and building management. The day she spoke with Occidental College students, there was the sound of marchers from a passing demonstration protesting for immigrant rights, and she stressed that “history is actually repeating itself” as she reflected on the earlier struggle of immigrant ancestors. It was May Day, May 1, the international day of labor protest, which has drawn new support in recent years in U.S. cities from the immigrant rights movement.

Ella Yee Quan, a founder of the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, reflects with humor and aplomb on the personal as well as the public side of oral history work. Her challenge to promote the oral history of Chinese American women continues to resonate. Ella Yee is one of four Chinese American women honored on a temporary mural (1994–2000) at a Chinatown Metro plaza on Cesar Chavez Boulevard done by the artist Carolyn Nye.

It was fun because we started something and we kept pushing it into people’s faces, like this is the historical society and we interviewed people and we were able to publish some books with the history and some of the history surprised us. We are American born and from there I went on to looking up my own family history. I was going to write it up but I didn’t, but all the materials of us [are] there and we have gotten a lot of people interested. And we worked on the World War II war book about the Chinese that were in the war because everybody mentions one group of people and ignores everyone else so we had our book. And we interviewed three, four hundred veterans and I think we found only two women but anyways, it was put into a book form, but many of the families, the young ones, sons, grandsons, great grandsons were particularly interested to see what their ancestors and grandparents did in the war. But when the book came out they all became interested and more and more people went and studied it up and researched their history. That was very satisfying.⁷

Munson Kwok came to Los Angeles Chinatown from San Francisco, descended from a Chinese American family that arrived by ship at the northern Californian coast in the early 1860s. He says that the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California was founded from social agitation from a diverse social leadership to create a social movement that would foster a more coherent community self-identity. In his account, the promoting of heritage and community self-identity becomes defensive weaponry against community threat or degradation:

We got into the history side of things at the time, which was around the early 1970s. The community’s identity was something that was being questioned, especially by the government establishment here. A place like Chinatown had a lot of impoverished people—immigrants who were of Chinese extraction, given over either as refugees during the time of the Vietnam War, or after 1955, as poor immigrants. They were not getting their fair share of city, or community, services. The reason that they were not is that they didn’t have a cohesive identity which government could recognize as a serviceable group. So several Chinatown activists of that era, including labor leaders, school teachers, ministers and intellectuals, decided this was not acceptable. So they began to get together in different groups and organize different forums by which this could be corrected. And one of them that came out of that was the Chinese American Historical Society of Southern California in 1975. That’s when I got involved, because of my interest in history.⁸

Munson Kwok works professionally as an aerospace engineer, so he engages in activist and volunteer work in Los Angeles Chinatown during his off-hours. He is also national president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, founded in Los Angeles in 1912 to advocate for civil rights and immigration rights for Chinese Americans.

In his oral history, Don Toy reflects on the pursuit of learning through volunteerism and social movement activism, which included working while he was in college in the Delano grape fields of California’s central valley. The Delano grape strikes gave birth to the United Farm Workers movement led by Cesar Chavez in the mid-1960s.

I always tell young people, you can get education in different ways. School is only one of the ways, life experience another, travel another, working with organizations, whether you’re interested or not, another.

Some of the jobs you hear about immigrants working in restaurants and farms for low wages and how you have no energy after work is true. Well when I was in college, I took a summer to go up to the grape fields in Delano, and basically picked grapes. If you experience it, then you understand it. I don’t know what the hardest work you ever did was, but nothing’s going to compare to ten to twelve hours and more of work in the hot sun picking grapes or lettuce. Then you have an understanding of what people go through, to make a living, to sacrifice and survive and this is in the United States, not in a third world country.

But picking grapes and other similar experiences … puts things in perspective, it makes you more aware. What I do with that awareness is that I have an understanding—and hopefully I can share that awareness, so that when people don’t understand, and say, “these people, immigrants are all bad,” I can help them understand that that’s not how it is. And hopefully with this type of awareness you can kill and break down a lot of stereotypes, and you look at a lot of commonalities, the things that, bottom line, as humans, we need. Hopefully with awareness, when there are injustices, people will stand up and speak. I’m under no illusion that I’m so great, and can change everything. But I’m hoping that, in our own little way and through our own little messages, I truly believe if we can influence another person, and they another one, that’s what is going to help us. In the long run, what I’d like to do with all of these injustices, conditions, stereotypes, problems, situations, misunderstandings, etc.—are happening, the bottom line, is that we realize and recognize “yes, you know, it really does exist and we can do something to change for the better.” So hopefully, we’ll have better understanding and won’t be afraid of each other.⁹

Don Toy has spent most of his career as director of the Chinatown Teen Post, which offers recreational activities, counseling and social services for at-risk youth. Over the years, they have expanded their work to include senior programs, legal aid and civil rights assistance for families.

Ethnic Heritage, Art, and Community Development

Over the past 15 years, I carried on my field research on ethnic enclaves and ethnic history as I moved from New York City to Los Angeles. Along the way, I also did field research in Houston (where I also taught for three years) and Miami, cities small enough for me to comprehend entirely and compare multiple enclaves (including Latino and black). I limited my focus to Chinese enclaves in New York and L.A., which are larger metropolitan centers that are harder to understand completely with the greater diversity of ethnic groups. While my first book, Reconstructing Chinatown, concentrated on economic and political functions of a single ethnic enclave, this book compares the culture and heritage sector in several Asian, Latino, and African American enclaves in four immigration gateway cities.

I believe the growth of the ethnic historic preservation movements and cultural heritage organizations are important avenues to fight racial–ethnic prejudice and discrimination and contribute to local economic and community devel...

Table of contents

• Metropolis and Modern Life
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• SERIES FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1 DOING ETHNIC HISTORY FROM COAST TO COAST
• 2 ETHNIC COMMUNITIES AND CULTURAL HERITAGE
• 3 ETHNICITY IN AMERICA FROM WORLD’S FAIR TO WORLD CITY
• 4 ETHNIC PLACES, POSTMODERNISM, AND URBAN CHANGE IN HOUSTON
• 5 HERITAGE, ART, AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT IN MIAMI’S OVERTOWN AND LITTLE HAVANA
• 6 REMOVAL AND RENEWAL OF LOS ANGELES CHINATOWN FROM THE FRONTIER PUEBLO TO THE GLOBAL CITY
• 7 PRESERVATION AND CULTURAL HERITAGE IN NEW YORK’S CHINATOWN AND LOWER EAST SIDE AND THE IMPACT OF THE 9/11 DISASTER
• 8 THE DEATH AND LIFE OF URBAN ETHNIC PLACES
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index